Good book
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, June 5. 2006
I try to keep my office organized. Not "neat" necessarily, but just ordered enough that I can do work efficiently. However, as my workload increases, the organization of my office decreases, until, well, I just can't find anything. So I knuckle under and take a few hours and clean up the office.
I was doing that this weekend, rearranging books on my bookshelves, when I came across a book I had puchased and read a few years ago, but hadn't reviewed (that is, re-read or re-skimmed) since then. So I stopped cleaning up (any excuse is a good excuse) and started re-reading the book... I had forgotten just how useful it was.
The book was 'Effective Java' by Joshua Bloch.
It encouraged me to be more proactive as far as watching how I code and, more importantly, use exceptions and how to handle synchronization. For people coming from a C background, the chapter on 'Substitutes for C Constructs' is worth the price of the book alone. It is, as the name implies, very focused on Java, so there's not a lot to gleam from it for a Ruby or Python coder. But I would wager than every Java programmer would at least find one item of use in the book, most likely several. All in all, a very good book, and one which I should never have relagated to a bottom shelf.